


Insular

by stjude



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Beaches, Brothers, Drug Use, Dysfunctional Family, Français | French, Implied Sexual Content, Infidelity, Islands, Masturbation, Memories, Metaphors, Pre-Canon, Smoking, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-06
Packaged: 2017-11-28 09:38:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stjude/pseuds/stjude
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>In June they leave England and fly across the Atlantic, west to the leeward Antilles, and Antigua.</i>
</p>
<p>A pre-canon look at a Holmes family holiday, from Mycroft's point of view.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insular

**Author's Note:**

> See End Notes for my warnings.

_I knew when dark-haired evening put on_  
 _her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea,_  
 _sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh,_  
 _that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting._  
—from _The Schooner Flight_ , by Derek Walcott

***

In June they leave England and fly across the Atlantic, west to the leeward Antilles, and Antigua.

***

Mycroft looks out the plane window to the shoreline and the pale arms of beach that embrace blue harbours, land straining to encircle and contain the immensity of ocean. From the air he can see Guadeloupe, where once the beleaguered English troops rallied to burn the French fleet. He read about it as a child, and can still picture the climactic confrontation between the two great admirals – Rodney commanding his _Formidable_ , De Grasse on the _Ville de Paris_ – going yardarm to yardarm. Both men blinded by the brilliance of the early morning sun reflected on water, but still close enough to clash swords between the decks.

(And Mycroft has always been other people. He's been Rodney, striding the deck gone slippery with brine, ordering cannons at broadside. He's been De Grasse with the sun in his eyes.)

He sees from the plane window the ragged coast, land green with a lacy edging of beach; and there a cluster of red-roofed hotels, crowding about a thin strip of pier. Further in: houses and towns succumbing to fields.

V.C. Bird International is a cheerful honeycomb of bright stucco and barrel vaults, stuck together side-by-side like a row of fat pink cakes. The plane disgorges its passengers right on the runway and though the sun is still low in the east it's already hot: the short walk across the steaming tarmac sets Mycroft's shirt sticking to his skin and his palm slips against the handle of his case. Sherlock undoes another button at his throat. Mummy looks cool and unmoved in caramel-coloured cashmere.

Their baggage is to be sent along later, and after slogging through Customs they once again emerge into sunlight, squinting. A tall man stood by a black Town Car meets them with a close-lipped smile. He's in a rumpled blue suit but no tie, and it looks as if he's had a while to wait.

'Mrs. Holmes?' he asks and Mummy nods. 'Hot enough for you?' he says, showing his teeth, 'I thought I might—'

She says, 'You're to take us to St Paul,' and the man stops smiling.

'Yes, ma'am.'

Then they're in motion again, being passively propelled. Sherlock, pale against the upholstery, keeps his eyes shut. The car smells of melting plastic.

Along the water at first – Fitch's Creek Bay – and then on to the highway, such as it is; he thinks, in England a proper highway wouldn't be named after a cricketer. Even inland the coral dust collects, white, like snow drifts at the edges of the road, and the car's wheels stir it, spraying up powder, fine like smoke.

Gliding slowly past cedar groves and cane fields Mycroft can see the island as it was a century ago, when the West Indies were Britain's ocean sceptre, and the Antilles a jewelled necklace about the neck of the Caribbean Sea. They should be in a carriage, driving to Government House to pay their courtesies. Once there they'd be smartly feted and after dinner the talk would turn to economic disturbance, native unrest and the sinister trend of the American market. Mycroft wonders if others too feel the slight disappointment and the nagging sense of failure that he judges inescapably present in the relationship between ex-coloniser and independent state. The notion that, no matter how long ago, something here was lost. And he has to turn his eyes from the sharp metallic glint of the sun on a passing car.

But instead of ladies in white and young men seeking fortune Mycroft sees two schoolboys on green bicycles who wave as they go by. 

(He's been a colonist, far from home. He's been a dark-skinned boy on a green bicycle.)

***

Willoughby House sits just inland from the beach at English Harbour, shielded from the road by a thick screen of black mangroves and fig trees. There's no gate, just a narrow gravel drive lined with tall, wild-looking grass, grey-green and coarse. Ferns grow sporadically between the ficus roots and crawl unfettered from the sandy soil.

(Mycroft learns later that the house first belonged to Sir Cecil Birch, a lesser peer, whose connection to the Willoughby name was at best diluted and at worst entirely fabricated. The house and its surrounds were burnt in 1805 during a slave revolt and subsequently rebuilt more modestly; Sherlock will point out to Mycroft the blackened ring still visible on the exposed stone foundation, and they'll draw their fingers along it, touching ash a century old. Apart from that its provenance is uncertain but Mycroft will come to suspect that they aren't the first wayward Holmeses to seek its dubious refuge.)

It's meant to be white, he supposes, but time and salt air have roughened the stucco, dulling its brilliance to a dingy grey and causing the paint to peel like sunburn, in thin onionskin layers. The shutters have recently been seen to, either washed or painted, and they stand open, emerald green and watchful. A shallow veranda extends along the length of the house, screened with an arcade, and wide French doors pierce the facing walls. In the centre of it all a massive flowering bougainvillea has twined itself, serpentine, about the portico, draped heavily and dripping red between the flanking columns. The overall effect is tropical; charming but somehow wild.

'The agent had it cleaned best he could on such short notice,' the driver is saying. 'There's food and all that. The bags'll be along – and the girl you were wanting.'

Mummy thanks him stiffly and Mycroft thinks he's never seen her look so out of place. She seems to shimmer minutely in and out of phase, a discreet sinusoid oscillating fractionally in the humid air. Before they left she'd called the trip a holiday, and Father had watched from the drawing room window as they'd driven away. In England's subtlety she's elegant and slim, but here in the harsh green light she looks tired, and old.

Mycroft waits by the car with his overnight case and Sherlock scuffs half-heartedly at the gravel with the toe of his shoe. At fourteen and eighteen the brothers are almost of a height. Sherlock takes after their father, long and dark-haired, almost regal in his bearing but too thin. Mycroft hasn't seen him in two months, not since the Easter holidays, and they didn't speak much on the plane.

'What do you think?' he asks, and Sherlock squints up at the house, shrugs one slim shoulder.

It's impolite not to answer a question but Sherlock has never cared about being polite, has never, as far as Mycroft knows, cared about much of anything. But he does say, 'Don't you wonder why we're here?'

So Mycroft answers: 'Holiday.'

Sherlock nods slowly and just drags his toe back and forth along the furrow he's dug, and beneath the pale gravel the soil is red clay.

***

That night it's too hot to sleep so Sherlock and Mycroft sit on the veranda, smoking the cheap duty-frees Mycroft bought in the airport and listening to the frogs croak raucously in counterpoint to the dull insect hum and the rhythmic chirping of the gryllidae. They don't speak but there's a calm between them, a certain lull like the inhale after laughing. It might be some mutual understanding or maybe complicity; either way it's smooth now, a fist gone slack. The smoke keeps the mosquitos away.

There's no furniture so they sit on the dusty tile – soft pink porphyry gone grey in the dark but still warm to the touch of a palm. Night can't leech the sunlight from the porous stone. Sherlock leans back, tilting his head on an exhale and Mycroft sees the scar under his jaw, a half-inch indentation. 

(At three and seven, playing at shaving; Mycroft's hand had slipped. There was so much blood, all at once, and it was so red that it _defined_ red – like nothing had ever been red before this sudden rush of blood. Sherlock had just stood there, eyes wide, until Mycroft stirred himself and yelled for help. Their nanny at the time was Helene, and Mycroft can still picture the blue dress she wore that day, and how it was stained with blood.)

And now Sherlock drags, exhales, smokes like it's not the first time – and why would it be? His brother's not a baby anymore. But in the corner of his eye Mycroft can still see the scar.

He looks up at the sky through the dark lace of leaves. He can just discern Gemini, parabolic with Pollux its bright vertex.

'He's done it again,' Sherlock says, suddenly.

Canis minor to the south, Procyon its most visible member, then Cancer.

'You don't know that.'

'Don't I?' Sherlock's looking at him keenly. 'And I suppose you're better informed?'

Mycroft considers this rhetorical. He's lived at school for the past five years; of course he takes long leave every half but even so he doesn't spend much time at home. (While he's away his linens are aired and his curtains dusted with a certain regularity, but when he returns his bedroom feels old, somehow, like it belongs to the past.) Mummy usually phones on Saturday, ringing his house master's office, and Mycroft tells her about his most recent tennis match or an upcoming excursion to the Tate and she listens but never says much. Every so often he speaks to his father, who only ever phones from his office. He'll hear a click and then a bored-sounding 'Please hold for Mr Holmes,' or occasionally, _'Restez en ligne pour M le ministre,'_ which means he's in Geneva.

Sherlock sighs, not really expecting a response. 'Anyway, it's obvious. His shirt cuffs.' (Like that should mean something.) 'And he's never home.'

'Maybe he's working.'

'Or maybe he's fucking.'

It sounds harsh: all consonants and no comforting innuendo. But Sherlock's like that – he can't be bothered to placate with euphemisms. Mycroft tries to remember the name of Hydra's brightest star but can't. He thinks: you can't see these stars from England. He thinks: stars are romantic.

'Mother knows?'

'We've left him, haven't we?'

'We're on holiday,' he corrects. 'There's no need for histrionics.'

Sherlock lights another cigarette, dragging deeply and sucking fire up along its length. He's made it too hot – it'll burn out quickly. Mycroft takes the flimsy packet and tamps it down against his thigh.

He's not sure what to say. He can feel Sherlock's anger, hot like the lighter's pop-up flame. Hot like the curl of burning paper between his fingers, but remote, too, like the distant constellations. Altarf, was that the name of his forgotten star? He used to know them all; had used to recite them to himself.

(And he's a child again with a star chart spread on the floor of his first bedroom, tracing the constellations and whispering their names. He's a stellar cartographer, just starting out – like Father said when they spoke on the phone – and his room is blue and his favourite chair in the whole house is by the telephone and it has worn velvet cushions and lion head finials.)

Mummy smoked all through her second pregnancy and as a result Sherlock was born three weeks premature. Father took Mycroft to see him in hospital and he'd been so small and wretched – foreign, somehow – with both his hands knotted into fists and his little eyes screwed shut. Mycroft recalls that his first emotion upon seeing his brother had been a vague sense of revulsion.

Sherlock was anaemic and had to be incubated like an undercooked turkey but Mummy returned home and for a week or so it was almost as if she'd never been pregnant, like maybe Mycroft had imagined all of it. One night she held him in her lap and put her arms around him and whispered that they'd taken her baby, that she'd never see him again, and then she started crying like she'd never stop. The next morning she was gone.

Father explained clumsily about Mummy needing a rest, but Mycroft knew who was to blame. Sherlock arrived home and proceeded to cry ceaselessly. He monopolized their nanny when the sharing was still fresh for Mycroft, and despite her efforts she seemed scarcely equipped to cope with such a fussy baby. She went around the house with a vacant, shell-shocked look, absently bouncing her squalling charge and saying 'Ch-ch-ch-ch.' And at night Mycroft could hear him whimpering softly, too tired to loudly voice his displeasure.

(Altair – was that it?)

By the time Mummy was well enough to come home Sherlock had stopped crying entirely.

Mycroft watches his brother now, ashing a cigarette onto the stone patio of an unfamiliar house a world away.

'Alphard,' he says, and laughs. The name springs up, unbidden. And consumed with a sudden impulse Mycroft touches Sherlock's shoulder, feels the anticipated flinch and then the reluctant stillness, the fabric and heat of skin. He's remembered.

And in the static air the crickets, and the stars.

***

From his balcony Mycroft can see English Harbour, a pale jewel both clear and somehow solid, in a glassy calm. Wind-roughened trees like tireless sentinels screen the house from the road below and crowd out from his field of vision any evidence of civilisation, leaving just branches and the water beyond. And the house an island in its own right. Mycroft thinks: marooned. He likes the sound of it in his head, solitary and romantic.

The morning's first cigarette hints at the buzz he never quite gets anymore and Mycroft tilts his head back, enjoying that certain calm weightiness, a bit like sinking. Then it dissipates and eventually he flicks the butt over the balustrade, watching it arc and land on the drive. Watching as light glints green off the mirror-shine surface of the black Lincoln, just now pulling in, crunching the pink gravel under tyres white with coral dust. Ashes to ashes: rinse and repeat.

Emerging from the car the same blue-suited driver, but with him now is a woman – unfamiliar. Mycroft's cigarette butt disappears under the sole of her sensible flat shoe. The driver speaks to her quietly and she laughs, covering her mouth with one hand. Under the sloping veranda roof now and out of sight. Marooned, he thinks again.

Mummy must have answered the door because the driver reappears and starts unloading their baggage. There's more of it than Mycroft remembers packing. 'We've left him,' Sherlock had said, and now there's more baggage, and a vague unease begins to coalesce, worry thickening in layers like impasto. The driver, as promised, has brought them a maid.

(Because what else could she be? Mycroft has seen her naked fingernails and blue-black arms rough to the elbows. And these are the things he's seen: the trees, the ocean, the car, her hand when she covered her mouth. And these are the things he's thought, already, not yet, or over and over again.)

He goes in and dresses, then, in faded school trousers and a white shirt left open at the neck. The air inside is already hot and stagnant; Mycroft rolls his cuffs back and admires the clean white crease. White means cricket and virgins and England – it's always appropriate.

And downstairs Sherlock and Mother sit together, sharing a newspaper like a married couple, and he thinks again how alike they are and how different; Mummy blonde and smooth and cold (even now she's wearing long sleeves like beige armour and Mycroft's sweating already but Mummy doesn't sweat, doesn't leak); Sherlock equally untouchable; but when they glance up at him they have the same eyes.

(He's heard that no man is an island but Mummy is no man. And he and Sherlock; boys still.)

There's a coffee pot on the table and on Sherlock's plate the decimated corpse of a mango, half-eaten, and a fork smeared with pulp.

'You took your time,' Sherlock says. 'There was coffee.'

'Thank you, no,' Mycroft replies, as if that were an offer. The French doors stand open and outside gulls circle in the still air, diving and spinning drunkenly. Their cries blend with the steady insect drone. Mummy lights a cigarette and Sherlock tries to steal one but she bats him away, murmurs, _vas-t'en, toi._

Later he and Sherlock will go to the beach, kicking up clouds of pale dust with their loafer toes as they walk along the road, and much later they'll go barefoot and shirtless and take the shortcut, through the sugar cane that grows wild like it can't remember cultivation. Much later their feet will roughen and callous and the sand won't burn and much later, years later, Mycroft will forget his umbrella and stare out a rain-slicked window and remember, suddenly, how his eyes hurt that summer from squinting against the sun.

***

The house is plagued with windows, which pierce nearly every available surface and stand open always, blind and staring, to tempt the reticent ocean breeze. As such there is little difference between inside and out; the foyer at the back bleeds into the veranda through open archways veiled thinly with dirty white netting. Sometimes in the morning sandpipers and black-headed gulls stroll brazenly through, pecking at crumbs of sweet bread. If she sees a crow Rosie shoos it out with her broom because it's bad luck to have a black bird in the house. She's from Martinique, and superstitious like that.

For weeks after they arrive it's the beach all day. They lie prone and pillow their heads with folded arms or supine, propped up on elbows; their skin sizzles, reddens, peels at night and finally browns and freckles. The water is clear and warm but shallow a long way out, making it hard to do much more than wade. They never swim much anyway.

The beach has its rhythms. Early on it's alive with children and then there's a lull at noon. Later there are vendors – bare-chested old men selling papayas and ginger beer. If they have it on ice Mycroft usually buys them bottles of Mauby and Sherlock drinks it without complaint. It's like Pepsi, only bitter at the end. (One night, stood on the veranda and looking out Mummy will say to him, 'It's like a picture here. Palm trees and pink lemonade,' and that's how her voice will taste, sweet and tonic.) If they stay long enough they usually see couples walking, hand in hand.

Sometimes Sherlock lies so still for so long that Mycroft has to ask him, 'Are you alright?' and he always responds: _oh, ça va._

When they get bored they sightsee, some. They walk Dockyard Drive to Nelson's and look at the yachts, gleaming white on the water like lost icebergs. In Parham they look for evidence of a purported leper colony, and at the cricket grounds they watch a match in the rain.

In the reedy grass behind the house Mycroft finds a tiny soapstone carving of a baby, no bigger than his thumb, and when he shows it to Rosie she calls it _gri-gri_ and tells him it's bad luck. So that week Sherlock amuses himself by leaving it places for her to find: in an empty teacup, tucked away in a dirty sock, on her pillow at night. Each time she crosses herself and swears in French, which is good for the vocabulary.

Mummy sends postcards of beaches and flowers and violent red chest-wound sunsets that inevitably read, 'Missing you but having a time – V.H.' Sherlock calls it keeping up appearances. Father doesn't phone.

But mostly it's the beach until their shoes are filled with sand and the breeze from the water makes their hair stiff with salt. They eke out a niche beneath the green expanse of mangrove leaves and Sherlock writes in the wet sand at high tide with a stick _Mycroft loves Cecilia._ She's their least favourite cousin, and Mycroft laughs because she's quite possibly the only actual girl that Sherlock knows. Mycroft writes _Lois loves Clark_ and Sherlock doesn't get it and whenever Mycroft asks him Sherlock just says _bon, ça va._

***

At night the house is mostly dark and Mummy goes to bed early. She's been reading the same pristine paperback copy of _Dubliners_ since before Christmas and every night she carries it upstairs in her smooth white hands, clutching it like a talisman. In the evenings she sits by the phone, smoking and pretending to read, and Sherlock sits across from her, watching and pretending not to. Mummy's a bad habit – like something you might give up for Lent. Sherlock is always looking sideways at her.

Usually Mycroft sits as well, reading, smoking, watching; but tonight he stays outside and shares a joint with Rosie while she waits for her boyfriend, a part-time philosopher who works at the yacht club and picks her up every Saturday night on an ancient motorbike. Mycroft appreciates the boring simplicity of Rosie; she soothes him; being with her is like falling asleep. And she might even be pretty in this light – the shadows on her skin glow blue and when she laughs her teeth glint white against dark lips. She laughs and touches his arm and in the day he'd be appalled but here, in the dark, on the veranda, Saturday, he thinks: I could have her if I wanted, and something swells in him, but it's neither lust nor pride and then he hears the engine roar, swelling too, and her boyfriend's there.

After they've gone he waits, shuts his eyes and tries to recapture the buzzing effervescence of his mild high but the crickets seem loud and suddenly, the sky's too close and it starts to rain. Water pours down, pounding and stirring the gravel, and steam billows up from the still sun-warm earth. An exhilarating cool sweeps over him. The crickets: now silent beneath the rush of rain.

In London when it rains the pavement washes clean and gutters clog with leaves, setting runoff to course in grey rivers through the streets. Rain purifies, turning things green and new, and from his bedroom window Mycroft, at five, can see passersby struggling with umbrellas and car doors. But here the rain digs deep, unearthing things long buried, bringing up red mud that oozes out between the trees' exposed roots. On Antigua rain defiles.

Mycroft's hair is damp from the moisture in the air and he shuts the French doors that stand open in the foyer. And then he sees Mummy's book, discarded on the blue settee, and in the quiet of the closed doors he hears their voices, upstairs, and he feels it again, something swelling in his throat, huge and indefinite. He remembers, then: the day he nicked Sherlock with the safety razor (small scar beneath his jaw, one half-inch in length – stimulus, response), and Mummy, returning: her face when she saw the bandage. Helene had told her how brave he was, _le pauvre, et comme il est beau avec sa blessure, un vrai petit homme,_ and he'd squirmed away from Mummy but she held him tightly until he acquiesced. That night she'd let him fall asleep on her lap, his face pressed against the side of her neck and his bandage white against pale skin. Mycroft was Sherlock then, in Mother's lap, resting his head on her breast; he was Mother as well, smelling antiseptic and baby soap.

(And now he's in the hall and he can hear soft voices, coming from the bathroom; voices soft like English rain.)

Sherlock had been the one to tell him of his father's infidelity, years later. Mycroft's first Christmas home after being away at school and the Kensington house was a war zone: Mummy silent, Father blank and absent; snow on the ground and holly on the mantle but all of it seeming a sad parody. Mycroft hardly had time to open his suitcase before Sherlock was there, tall for his nine years, informing him that Father had confessed an affair with his secretary, and that Mother was considering her options. The rest of that holiday had been tense and knot-like, a lump none of them could quite swallow. 

There are windows in this hall and Mycroft closes them, shutting their green eyes against the steady beat of rain. Through her room, then, until he's at the en suite; he reaches it and hesitates, his hand unwilling to disobey the intentions behind a closed door. Sherlock learned to stop crying; he's never been afraid of anything, but Mycroft is, a little, afraid of this.

And this is what he hears – fingers poised above the handle – Sherlock: 'It's not as if this would be the first time he's lied to win you back,' and Mummy, quieter, 'But what if he's telling the truth?' and Sherlock, again: 'Siger never tells the truth.'

Mycroft pushes open the door, his hand acting without permission, and he feels a rush of heat, wet and humid. He's seen this bathroom before, once, when Sherlock thought to leave the obeah carving by the basin for Rosie to find when she replaced the towels. He recalls it being large and impersonal, with a claw-footed bathroom and hexagonal white tiles.

But now it's hot and wet, the air thick and oozy with steam and smoke. It smells like soap and cigarettes and he has to blink the steam away; when it clears he sees Sherlock, flushed, perched bird-like on the pedestal sink, his back against the mirror, a cigarette between his two long fingers. (It's one of Mummy's; hers have gold filters.) The bathwater, opaque and milky, hides most of Mummy save for her shoulders and one lax arm, and Mycroft doesn't have to look away to avoid meeting her eyes; she turns, just slightly, towards the wall and Sherlock says, 'Father called.'

'It's raining,' Mycroft says, and then realises. 'He did?'

'You were outside.'

'Sherlock,' says Mummy, 'won't you ask Rosie to make tea?'

'It's Saturday. She's left.' 

But Sherlock's already unfolding, running a hand through his curls wet with steam. 'Come on,' he murmurs, taking Mycroft's arm. 'I'll do it.'

As the door closes Mummy calls out, 'And bring me my book.'

***

'What were you—'

'Just talking.'

'But.' Mycroft clears his throat. 'It's raining,' he says, again.

'Oh.' And then, sudden: ' _Oh._ You think we—'

' _No._ '

'Then why ask me?' Sherlock snaps.

'I don't know.'

'Don't be disgusting,' and Mycroft hears _don't be jealous._ Mummy's always liked Sherlock best.

***

The rain drags on and on and leaks through the roof, rendering Sherlock's bedroom unfit. Rosie's boyfriend tries to patch it but the damp has soaked through and everything's humid and tropical – 'A breeding ground for mildew,' says Mummy – and Sherlock doesn't seem to mind sharing with Mycroft.

His bedroom walls, white-washed plaster, painted over in spots to hide the damp, fascinate with endless variance – here, stained pale with yellow light, there abraded roughly, showing grey beneath – and crumble constantly, leaving the corners of the stone floor chalky with sloughed-off dust. Rosie sweeps but it never gets clean; it's as if the house itself is conspiring against them and colluding in its own inevitable decline. Is it entropy, if intentional? His room sits at the top of the stairs on the left and opens onto the balcony running parallel to the house's facade. There's a large, cloudy mirror hung above the bed in a regrettable gilt frame and the mattress is uncomfortably soft, but it suits well enough.

Most days they don't bother getting dressed.

They lie shirtless and lazy and Mycroft smokes the last of Rosie's weed, not even bothering to open a window, until the room becomes close and redolent with sticky-sweet fumes. One morning Sherlock says, 'Do you like it here?' and then, not waiting, 'Because we're never going back to England.'

Mycroft sighs, 'Do let's not be dramatic.' Although it's not as if they've never moved. Mummy took them to live in France for a year, but this is different.

But he too has been thinking lately of islands.

***

Night means darkness but the heat remains like it's pulsing from the planet's molten core, sweating up through the ground.

And now: late and the stutter-stop of motion, peripheral; Mycroft drags his eyes open and blinks against the thick, dark air; the moon through trees; everything close and green. He feels it again, that slight shifting; blinks again, and the moonlight bleeds through his eyelids; hears the quiet – too late for crickets and frogs, too early for crows.

Sherlock, beside him, sighs a little and his breath hitches on the inhale. Mycroft can feel him moving, unsubtle and specific.

So he coughs and his brother stills.

'Are you awake?'

A moment. Nothing said, but the quiet is obvious as they both hold their breath. Mycroft stares at the ceiling, tracing a crack in the plaster that meanders aimlessly along the line of moulding. He doesn't look at Sherlock but he imagines him, anxious and flushed.

The hazy green light smoothes the edges of the room; slides gently into the dark places; makes everything seem strange and alien. He feels adrift. And Sherlock starts to move again – not rhythmic, now, but fitful.

'Sherlock,' Mycroft warns. And his voice is thick and unfamiliar so he clears his throat and tries again. 'Sherlock.'

'Just a minute.' Sherlock sucks an inhale and twitches upward, pulling their shared sheet taut. Mycroft can't close his eyes now – can't even blink – and Sherlock breathes, _oh_ : like that, breathy; and he twists his hips suddenly as if caught by surprise.

'Maybe you—' He can't think of what to say and Sherlock's not really listening, so Mycroft tries, 'I can't begin to tell you how inappropriate this is.'

'Shut _up,_ I'm almost—'

Breaking off, Sherlock laughs, or chokes, maybe, and then his free hand is on Mycroft's forearm and he squeezes roughly.

It seems like minutes before Sherlock exhales and when he does, finally, he laughs shakily. ' _Fuck,_ ' he sighs and his voice doesn't even have the decency to be tinged with regret. Mycroft can feel those fingers slacken and Sherlock rubs his arm lightly, maybe unconsciously, just enough to go against the grain of hair and raise gooseflesh. 'Sorry. I couldn't.'

'Don't touch me,' he mutters, belatedly. 

'Go back to sleep, then.' Sherlock leans over him and takes the packet of cigarettes off the bedside table. He puts two in his mouth at once and lights them both one-handed; Mycroft takes what's proffered and inhales, breathing in smoke and normality.

Sherlock slides his right hand out from where it's hidden and Mycroft, glancing over at the movement, watches him fist the sheet, absently.

'That's revolting,' he sighs and Sherlock shrugs with one bony shoulder, exhaling simultaneously and Mycroft can _smell_ him, beneath the smoke. 'You'll wash that yourself. Don't you dare leave it for Rosie.'

Sherlock's mouth quirks up around the cigarette; smoke haloes around them and the sheet's slipped down, showing off his sunburnt chest. 'She'd probably use it in a voodoo spell. Or do you need blood for those?'

Mycroft shakes his head and smiles in spite of himself. 'Well, _faute de mieux._ '

Sherlock drags and says, 'Sorry I woke you.'

'Since when have you adopted this little perversion?'

'You think I wanted you to—'

'No, I just meant. Nothing.'

Sherlock frowns, slightly – just the dip of his smooth brow – and reaches over to ash his cigarette into a repurposed teacup. He's serious when he says: 'I can't help it. It gets like that all the time now.'

'You have a gift for hyperbole.'

But Mycroft remembers fourteen, how nothing worked anymore, and how he'd spent long nights suffering his own internal seismology until he could have sworn he was able to feel the stretching of tissue and the deep bone-ache of growing pains. Mycroft looks at his brother: quiescent now but still disquiet; a raw nerve rubbed sore; and he softens. 'Look, just leave it.'

'If you like.'

The cigarettes finished, there's no more light and even the stars seem dimmer when Sherlock, his voice heavy with smoke, says, 'She's going to leave him, I think.'

'Do you want her to?'

A hesitation, or maybe a mustering: 'He makes her very unhappy.' And then: 'People have done, sometimes. Haven't they?'

'Done what?'

'Left.'

'I suppose so.'

_I left you,_ Mycroft thinks. _I left you and let her have you and I thought you'd won._ But instead he says, 'You shouldn't smoke,' and Sherlock rolls his eyes and says, 'You're one to talk,' and Mycroft says, 'Yes, well, _I'm_ old enough to kill myself.'

They sit together, then, their bare backs sticking to the smooth ebony headboard, just sitting; until Sherlock starts to say 'Mummy—' and Mycroft, all in a rush, says, 'Sherlock, has she ever—' and his brother shuts his eyes.

Then silence, and the space between them, a cool emptiness. And then Sherlock whispers, 'Mycroft,' and Mycroft tells him to go back to sleep.

***

A few days later; the beach; shade-dappled sand. Sherlock with his eyes shut behind dark glasses, like a starlet with a hangover; one hand curled around his bony hip and the other by his face, tilted in supplication. Mycroft watches a chubby toddler throw handfuls of sand into the water. He can still see white finger smears on her fat arms – haphazard daubs of sunblock she was too impatient to let absorb. She's probably sticky.

Sherlock shifts then and Mycroft feels it coming but he still flinches at the touch. They both do that, he's noticed; both of them wary and vigilant.

And now this hand on his knee. The fingers move, fitful and then with a purpose, each finger pressing separately and together, not quite rhythmic, and Sherlock says, 'Remember this?' and then finger, finger, thumb.

Mycroft looks at his brother, whose eyes are still closed beneath the sunglasses, sees his hands, the pulse of his fingers; then the room, dark, and the plaintive notes. The light in the parlour had been soft that night, diffuse and green (no, not green – it hadn't ever been _green_ ) and Sherlock had played for them. He'd had to stretch to reach the pedals, Mycroft remembers; and he'd hated the piano, even then. Mummy glowed and after they'd eaten ice cream, alone in the kitchen. It was mint, he remembers, in glass dishes.

'Chopin,' he says, and he does remember. 'Your first and last recital.'

'Yes. My debut and swan song, all at once.'

Sherlock stills, letting his hands drop, palms up, on the sand. The music stops and the glass bowls shimmer and dissolve, shatter and crystallize, become leaves and grass and radio waves.

Sherlock says: 'A-flat,' because it sounds like rain. He says and sighs: 'That was before—'

'There was no before.'

Mycroft watches the toddler, throwing sand. She might have been there forever, smeared with hasty sunblock, throwing earth at an ocean. Or maybe in the next minute her father will answer a sudden impulse and sweep her into his arms, dipping her low enough to drag her sandy curls through the water as she squeals, delighted. Or maybe he's not her father. Maybe she's been kidnapped, held for ransom; maybe in a week or so her real father, in Germany, or New York, will receive an envelope and open it to find a single lock of her blonde hair. It might still smell like sunblock and sea.

Or she'll grow up and live and die while he sits here with sand between his fingers. Rinse, please, and repeat.

He says, again: 'There was no before,' but he means it differently now, because sometimes temporal linearity becomes abstract, and sometimes simultaneously he's seven in his bath and eighteen on a beach and an old man who struggles to rise from a chair with lion head finials. (He commits suicide every night and murder in the morning; every second of every day he kills another alternative. The architect with two failed marriages (felled as he brushes his teeth); the shipping magnate late for dinner two nights in a row; the accountant, dry-eyed at a funeral; the historian; the forger; the still-warm corpse. He kills them again and again they rise and again they fall, ad infinitum. Every day he sees before him the ocean and every day it's just a little wider. Rinse, rinse, rinse.)

Sherlock rolls his eyes. Mycroft can't see him do it but he knows he does. 'No need to wax philosophical. I only meant—'

'I'm hungry,' says Mycroft. 'Let's go in.'

Propping himself up on one elbow, his side frosted white with sand, Sherlock says, 'Listen. Why do you always—'

'Oh, _I_ always.'

A fraction of a beat, then Sherlock sighs and leans back. 'All this eating and lying about – you're getting fat as a pig. The natives might mistake you and roast you over a spit.'

Mycroft just flicks sand at him.

***

Rosie had been singing, before, and now it runs through his mind – an old song he's heard before but can't quite place. Her voice in his head, singing: _Bye bye love. Bye bye sweet caress, hello emptiness._ Its tune is bland and innocuous, but the words incongruously sad.

'Mycroft,' Mummy says, sharply, and maybe he's been humming it. Sherlock licks his spoon and she frowns at him as well, so it's one of these nights.

Then she says: 'If there's anything you wanted to do before we leave—' and Sherlock looks up sharply and says, 'Leave?'

Mycroft watches the space between them: Mummy's pale hands re-folding her napkin.

When the silence gets weighty he says, 'You've spoken to Father, then.'

Mummy nods, once, and smiles like Sherlock sometimes does, like she knows she ought smile but can't quite. 'It's time we went home. I don't know about you but I've had about as much sun—'

Sherlock barks a laugh, starts, 'I would have thought—' and Mummy tells him, in French, to be nice: _sois gentil_. Her face says, please, but her eyes are cold.

'I will not,' Sherlock insists, anger seething just below the surface. 'You expect—'

'I expect you to behave.'

Again Sherlock says, 'I will _not,_ ' and Mycroft tries to warn him with his eyes but Sherlock's not looking. Helene used to say to them _soyez sages, les gosses,_ and suddenly he remembers how Sherlock used to suck his thumb and how Helene called him her _petit pouce._ The year they'd lived in France she'd always turned his shirts wrong side out because the seams bothered his skin and he'd say _ça me gratte, ça me gratte._

'It's nearly September,' Mycroft says calmly. 'We do have school, unless they've cancelled it this year.'

'Mycroft,' Mummy murmurs, her voice soft, 'go and ask Rosie about tea.' It's the same way she tried to dismiss him before. He hears both the words and the unspoken intent: leave me. I would be alone. Let me try to explain it to him. She'd sent him from her presence in the bathroom, and he thinks of how she'd been garbed in milky-cool water. Sherlock with her, near her, and everything green and wrong. A nauseous seasick colour – a green like bile; the subtle stain of impropriety. And although she's sending him away he feels a sudden kinship because he'll understand and Sherlock won't. Behind his eyes a raucous symphony breaking:

_I'm a-through with romance_   
_I'm a-through with love_   
_I'm a-through with counting_   
_The stars above_   
_She was my baby…_

They're locked together at the eyes and now he's extraneous; he can't hear their telepathy. So he goes, and he sees in his mind the song, scrolling endlessly, not fading now but growing louder, _bye bye my love goodbye—_

He walks down to the beach then, under stars cloaked in thick cloud cover – it looks like rain, again, and another hothouse day indoors. Watching the mosquitos blunder through the stagnant air; and the slow grey moths that circle clumsily, the dust from their wings filtering soft diffuse haloes around the electric lights. Another day of unwaned sameness.

And Mycroft digs his bare toes into the wet sand, settling himself on a scrubby patch of grass, pulling his knees up; moisture seeps from the clayey soil. How overwhelmingly Mother holds Sherlock in her thrall; how he clings to her with stubborn tenacity; how she always keeps him wanting. There's something of empire in that as well, in the push and pull of control and desire. Her dominion and his complicity.

He thinks then of his father, stern and patrician, and of his sixteenth birthday. Father had driven to Windsor to take him to dinner, and they'd sat together in silence across plates of duck confit and steak frites. Mycroft had been expecting his mother as well, but when he asked Father just said, 'She's being unreasonable,' and then, 'I hope you know better than to discuss these matters with anyone outside the family.' He'd given Mycroft his present, unwrapped – a tennis racquet. When they parted that night in front of Holland House Father shook Mycroft's hand and said, 'I'm glad I don't have to explain myself to you. You're old enough to understand.'

But that had made him sad, somehow.

He wonders if Mother is explaining herself to Sherlock. Maybe she'll be honest and tell him: nothing will ever be different. That's what he'd meant, on the beach that morning, about before. It's always the same, a beach, a book, supper uneaten and Sherlock wanting what she can't give. Whether it's duck confit or Rosie's boucan on the plate in front of him, he'll always be hungry; Mycroft considers: without food you die but some things you can learn to stop wanting.

***

The crickets are loud so Mycroft drags himself back to the house and leans in the doorway, listening:

'Why? I thought— I mean, you _said_ —'

'You needn't interrogate me. And I remember what I said, Sherlock.'

'You promised. You—'

'That's not fair.'

' _Fuck_ fair. He's never been a husband to you.'

'Language,' she chides. 'I didn't expect you'd understand.'

'Doesn't it matter what I think?'

His brother's voice is cracking open like something wants to crawl out of his throat: maybe the words, because when he says them they're alien and awful: 'I love you.'

And once he's said it he can't stop and he keeps on saying it, again and again, I love you, I love you, I love you, and Mummy can't; she's quiet. But she finally says, harsh: ' _Reprends-toi._ For God's sake, Sherlock, stop acting like a child.'

And Sherlock whispers, 'You're hurting me,' like he's surprised. And Mycroft again sees him at three, silent as blood pours down his neck.

Later the night's like any other – hot and unbearable, oppressive, really, like the weight of Mother's hand on Sherlock's chest, lingering there; her touch both defilement and benediction, succour and respite. She whispers to him, 'Don't fret,' or maybe 'You can read to me tonight – you know how I like that,' and Sherlock shuts his eyes and his lashes smudge dark against pale skin marred by sun.

Then she goes upstairs with _Dubliners_ still unread, its spine smooth and uncreased and Sherlock keeps his eyes closed so he doesn't forget the weight of her palm. His eyes are closed so he doesn't see her stop on the stair and wait for an instant, an eternity, to see if he'll follow. His eyes are closed, so he can't see the grey in her hair.

***

They sit together in the airport, their arms in short sleeves and the backs of their calves sticking to the cracked leather seats.

'You could come to Eton in the fall,' Mycroft says. 'You know they'd have you.'

'And waste my sweetness on that desert air?' Sherlock picks intently at a scab on his knee. Each time he flicks away a bit of dark tissue the new skin shows through, pink and fresh against his tan. 'I can't leave home. Mother needs me.'

Mycroft sighs. 'No,' he says quietly. 'No she doesn't.'

***

In August, summarily expulsed from Eden, they again take flight, north-east across the Atlantic.

And on the other side of the world England waits.

***

_The end._

**Author's Note:**

> My warnings: this story mentions emotional incest and possibly hints at actual incest (although I'd like to leave that up to the reader). It also refers to postpartum depression and general parental neglect.
> 
> I have almost no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to England, Antigua, astronomy, or British colonial history, so I think you can see why I decided to write this story. I'd like to apologize for any inaccuracies.
> 
> The following are translations for the French I used:
> 
> _Restez en ligne pour M le ministre_ — Please hold for the Minister  
>  _Vas-t'en, toi_ — Go on, you  
>  _Bon, ça va_ — I'm fine  
>  _Le pauvre, et comme il est beau avec sa blessure, un vrai petit homme_ — The poor [baby], and how handsome he is with his wound, a real little man  
>  _Faute de mieux_ — For want of something better  
>  _Sois gentil_ — Be nice  
>  _Soyez sages, les gosses_ — Boys, behave  
>  _Petit pouce_ — Little thumb  
>  _Ça me gratte_ — It itches me  
>  _Reprends-toi_ — Get hold of yourself
> 
> In writing this story I did actually use two books as reference for Antigua's history and its flora (both accessed online at OpenLibrary); they were:
> 
> Froude, James Anthony. The English in the West Indies; or, The bow of Ulysses. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.: 1888.
> 
> Oliver, Vere Langford. The history of the island of Antigua, one of the Leeward Caribbees in the West Indies, from the first settlement in 1635 to the present time. London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1894.
> 
> The lyrics are from the Everly Brothers' song 'Bye Bye Love.'


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